HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND 167 



The Body-Mind Complex 



Mind, still regarded by most of mankind as something dis- 

 tinct and apart from the body, is thus exhibited as but part and 

 parcel of it. A deaf, dumb, and blind animal, deprived of tongue, 

 and olfactory mucous membrane, without sensations from the 

 outside world can grow no mind, in the sense of intelligence. 

 The sense organs of the body mediate the primary mind stuff. 

 Without internal secretions and a vegetative system there could 

 be no soul, in the sense of complex emotion. Nor those combi- 

 nations of thought and emotion which synthesize attitudes, sen- 

 timents and character. The internal secretions and the vegeta- 

 tive system mediate the primary soul stuff. Mind is thus 

 emulsified with body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul 

 was once a subtlety of metaphysics. Now when mind appears 

 soaked in matter saturated with chemicals like the hormones, 

 therefore woven out of material threads, the independent entity 

 created out of intangible spirit flies like a ghost at dawn. 



View the outlook. Mind, the slippery phantom, now becomes 

 controllable for the purposes of everyday life, because we can 

 put our fingers upon, touch, handle and change these material 

 factors, the internal secretions and the vegetative system. 

 Through them we may affect the very quality of the nerve tissue. 

 The future of the race, the future of human nature, depends upon 

 the knowledge to be born of the researches into the vast possibili- 

 ties of this idea. Man, the Adventurer, the prey of Chance and 

 Luck, will then become, indeed now becomes, the Captain of 

 Fate and Destiny. 



It is, of itself, a revolution in the intellect, to conceive of in- 

 stincts and emotions, suggestibility and contra-suggestibility, 

 initiative and imitation, volitions and inhibitions as chemical 

 matters. In all their relations, mutually reacting effects and 

 defects, excesses and deficiencies, the internal secretions set up 

 psychic echoes and reflections. When morbid and their equilib- 

 rium dislocated, we may even have phobias and neuroses. 



A man's nature is essentially his endocrine nature. Primarily, 

 when he is born, he represents a particular inherited combination 

 of different glands of internal secretion. They, constituting the 

 inventory of his vital stock in trade, start him in life. After- 

 wards, food, the routine of his existence, the accidents of experi- 

 ence, education, disease and misfortune, in short, environment, 

 modify him because they modify his ductless glands and his 



